I'd like to write an essay about musicality in verse.

Diction plays a part in it. Also, the mysterious (to me) space around lines, phrases, stanzas. Space created by emotional intensity, or the obliquity of meaning.

Silence. Rest note. ("Rest Note" - good book title. copyright HG)

Music in poetry like color &/or spatial design in painting(?)

A potential weakness in American poetry : this framing space gets lost when the poet gropes for expansiveness, running-on, getting-it-all-said, tumbling from one joke to the next, "windy discoursing".

Then the poem sounds too much like talk.

The space of traditional metrics & rhyme was a kind of template for spatial (musical) control.

We got bored with it.

But complexity & resistance add interest.

I can no longer read poems that only sound like somebody "talking clever" at me.

But there are as many difficulties & pitfalls with "musicality". Falling in love with the sound of your own fricatives. Close reading of the "e" vowels. Mantic yammer.

Ominous, portentous ponderosa. The three word line, dropped like a tong of bricks.

*

Is it possible to speak of the "music" of an image?

That's what stopped me in my tracks when I picked up a book of Mandelstam (in translation, no less - & not the Merwin versions). The verbal image carried across its music - in a language with a completely different alphabet & sound.

& why was Crane so completely different? Well, for one thing, he started from Joyce. Anti-Pound, anti-Eliot, almost as much as Stevens was. His Bridge is a pun-soaked "day in the life".

Zuk set himself up as Pound's dialectical flipside (Pound/Zuk, not Olson/Zuk is the real antinomy). But the Mallarmean extremism is not that different from Pound's aesthetic liminality. Wanting to be like Shakespeare : but being a sweet Shakespeare in a kind of muted Joseph Cornell music-box.

Paterson : too much the willed effort? A rush job. Didn't soak the guitar wood long enough. Plays on the surface - drab, prosaic.

Fascinating (& concise) article on "Music & Poetry" in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics. Can Henry reunite his split personalities? Stay tuned.

Odd how musicality in poetry - from symbolism onward into the 20th century - became an avenue for increasing experiments in obscurity and private poetic language. Odd, that is, when you consider that music itself has so many characteristics of a "universal" language (of feeling and symbolic order).

What if poets applied musicality in the direction of intelligibility, communicative power? The power of feeling & shared experience. In the same way that ecologists idealize sharing one world. I recognize very clearly how these notions might seem threatening to the very essence of many poets' practice. The truth must be that every poet must find their own balance between sheer verbal exploration & originality, on the one hand, and clarity & intelligibility on the other. And the alignment of this balance will have a great deal to do with the larger or deeper motive or telos for the writing itself. Poets will often "sacrifice obscurity" - turn to very ordinary speech, even cliches - if the larger aesthetic purpose demands it.

(Sometimes I think all creative effort is merely an attempt to recover the powerful feelings and sensations of childhood.)

What do I think of this poem by Lisa Jarnot?

I read most of Black Dog Songs (though quickly, at work), and was impressed with the technique. The artful dumbing-down of "poetic diction" (to a kind of amalgam of Blake, baby-talk, and pop songs). I've also heard Jarnot read, & again, was impressed with the fluent musicality of her poems in performance. I've read (or tried to read) her book Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck Press), an early effort from her Providence days. Wondering if the title was a jab at the Poetry Mission, a local literary group (doubt it).

Her poem reminded me of this old poem of mine (published in the mag A Fine Madness in 1985):

Land of Lincoln

 
It is enough to be with them,
the children like shy seedlings,
and the newspaper shedding its phrases
to the sleepy music in the squares.
It is enough to step out,
wind dusting ashes from the sill,
workmen hauling everything away,
furniture, knicknacks, loveletters
written in robin's egg, and spidery
aquamarine.  A parade, they said,
is a mild form of chaos,
and so we marched, eyes closed,
to the somnolent trumpets and drums -
around the familiar four corners,
the sad mothers fainting, and dizzy
children, dazzled by flags and ice cream.
The mayor spoke under the statue
erected over the slain brigade.  A breeze
touched every bowed head, leading us
to the flag-draped coffin of our lord.
Impossible to step away from summer -
the raft the river carries under us,
and the canoe of the silent ferryman,
lifting his hand for a copper penny.